Joe Robinson’s Post

Thank you to Joe Robinson for sharing his thoughts on how he got into compliance and fighting financial crime! I'm inspired to do the same. Here’s my journey into the compliance, in three bullets: 1️⃣ I got my first exposure to compliance while working as a teller at a major bank. I was trying to figure out a career (and looking at the FBI’s career page a LOT) when I realized my bank had a fraud prevention department. I didn’t have a degree, a background, or a clue, but I knew what our customers were like and I was eager to learn how to prevent fraud. After applying three different times, I landed an entry-level role identifying new account fraud. 2️⃣ After a couple years learning more about different flavors of fraud (deposit fraud, electronic fraud, tax refund fraud, etc) I wanted to dive further into more complex schemes and discovered that what criminals do with money after they steal it is just as important to track. With that, I made the move into anti-money laundering investigations. When I first started, I was terrible at it. It took about a year for that to turn around, and a lot of it had to do with having (and learning how to use) the proper tools. But once I knew how to use the tools in my tool belt, my career took off. I quickly transitioned onto my bank’s special investigations team identifying and investigating some of our most complex and large cases and money laundering networks. Hat tip to my former manager Brian Winner for giving me the space and capacity to bring those monster cases to his desk. 3️⃣ Doing meaningful work is critical in compliance. It can be hard not to become jaded in this line of work, and I saw the toll it took on myself and on others. Eventually I left traditional finance and entered the fintech world. There I saw more and more how poor tooling could adversely affect compliance teams at the program and operational levels in an org, and at the developmental and personal health of financial crimes investigators. For those that do the meaningful work of investigating, I see you. Meaningful work for me now is making the meaningful work of others easier.

Compliance folks: what are your three bullets? My co-founder Joe Robinson posted his story about how he got into the fight against financial crime. Comparing notes across the team led to many interesting paths. Here is mine; what is yours? It could be said that I was born into it. My parents met on Capitol Hill debating regulatory policy, and my mother serving as deputy comptroller of the currency led to much more exposure than most kids out there. I was much more interested in the tech world, but I had a formative experience working in a computer store during school, where I fell for a fraudster with a clever check fraud scheme. It was my first exposure to the financial crime world and sparked a drive to make life more difficult for bad actors. After graduating, I joined the OTS (a regulatory agency under the Treasury Department). I spent about three years training as an examiner with Jason Boova and Nick Hazlett, learning the ins and outs of supervision. We signed up at the beginning of the financial crisis and witnessed some of the most rapid changes in the global approach to regulation in decades. Despite the changes, it still felt like we were not leveraging technology effectively to prevent the next crisis. I ended up leaving to join a company called Treliant, working under Lyn Farrell to get some exposure to solution building. While there, I helped launch their fintech practice area, eventually leading me to Circle, where I met Joe. Working with Joe and the rest of the fantastic technical talent at Circle was an epiphany. There was no established model for building an AML function in the crypto space, so we could be creative. One of my most memorable moments was an early meeting where I described a typical AML program and had an engineer ask, "Why does it need to be done that way?". When I probed his thinking, he suggested an alternative path leveraging our data capabilities to achieve a superior result. Our work also led to my first direct exposure to the law enforcement community and its challenging mission. People like Robert and Steve Gurdak gave me perspective on the challenges law enforcement faces daily. They reset my thinking on the true goal of AML - not a compliance exercise but a collaborative effort to get actionable information to law enforcement as quickly as possible. I became convinced that the future of compliance and AML is anchored in data sciences. Eventually, that line of thinking led to the Hummingbird founding team (Joe, Jesse, Ryan, Ann, and me) coming together to build it. Eight years later, with support from amazing investors like Kabir, Satya, and Michael, our inspiring mission-driven team is building tools for the unsung heroes in the fight against financial crime. We created an internal series called Hummingbird Profiles to allow our customers and friends to tell their stories, which inspired us to start this thread. We want to hear from the unsung heroes out there - please share your story!

Coris (YC S22) has raised $3.7M in seed funding to bring automation and intelligence to the archaic processes still used by many financial services firms to evaluate risk for small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers. The SMB sector boasts over 400 million companies, but risk analysis is hampered by fragmented, unstructured data. While payments data and bank-level financial data have helped somewhat in recent times to fill the void in SMB underwriting, they still miss huge signals on how a business operates. Coris utilizes large language models (LLMs) to analyze unstructured data, aiding in tasks like automated underwriting. The founders, Vinodh Poyyapakkam and Shyam Maddali, spent 20+ years at companies like eBay, PayPal, WePay/JPMC and Google managing small business risk for payments and lending products. Two of the biggest problems they faced were: gaining a solid understanding of what an SMB does at the time of underwriting and continuing to keep a tab externally on how they operate. Their latest offering, CorShield, combats impersonation fraud in SMB onboarding by verifying applicant information against diverse online sources. This approach allows for a detailed risk assessment, improving speed and accuracy over traditional manual checks. Coris's AI platform revolutionizes risk management by significantly speeding up processes and integrating tools for smoother onboarding and ongoing oversight, marking a strategic shift in how businesses handle risk. Congrats to the team on the round!

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering how compliance teams can combat the rising cost of compliance! 🎯 👊 Check out The Fintech Times feature stories to find out what I, alongside other industry voices, have to say about the biggest challenges facing compliance teams. 💬 👇  

🔍 Compliance & Technology: A Unified Approach I recently read an insightful article by Alan Carlisle, Chief Compliance Officer at Marqeta, on the importance of embedding compliance early and often in the fintech world. Alan’s perspective resonated deeply with me, not just as a professional in financial crime prevention, but also from my past experiences as a CTO. I used to say, “I fully embrace the DevOps movement and releasing value to production as quickly and often as possible. But if security is not at the beginning of your value stream, you are rapidly releasing risk and vulnerabilities, not value.” This is as true for compliance as it is for security. Alan highlights that compliance is often seen as a blocker, but it’s actually a critical enabler of sustainable growth and innovation. His advice to bring compliance into the conversation from the start mirrors the same philosophy we apply to security and DevOps: shift left, and integrate these essential guardrails early in the process. In my current role at ComplyAdvantage, we see firsthand how organizations that prioritize compliance and security from the outset are not only protecting themselves but also enhancing their ability to innovate and deliver real value to customers. Whether developing cutting-edge AML solutions or deploying the latest fraud detection tools, the principle remains the same: don’t just build fast; build right. 👉 The takeaway? Make compliance and security integral to your value stream, not afterthoughts. Only then can you confidently accelerate your growth without compromising on trust, safety, and resilience. Thanks to Alan Carlisle for shedding light on this critical approach! #Fintech #Compliance #DevOps #Security #RiskManagement #FinancialCrimePrevention

I'm excited to share an insightful article from The Fintech Times' September RegTech theme. It covers the biggest challenges facing compliance teams today and includes some of my own comments. I encourage you to take a moment to read it: https://lnkd.in/ePdHmuRm

Really insightful article below on the latest challenges for compliance teams:

Being indexed to growth businesses is a huge growth lever. For example, Ava was one of our first 20 customers and they’re growing rapidly, (6.5x since 2023!). We call them our baby whale 🐳 One consequence of growth is fraud. Omar Sinno, the CEO of Ava has always been thoughtful about this. Keeping fraud low enhances the overall customer trust, and ensures that customers attach, return and trust your product. Ava offers a credit builder card that's being used by the subprime to improve their credit scores. The product is much loved by their customers and they have a 4.9 star rating on both Apple app store and Play store. I’ve been where they are in my career, and meeting in person helps me build empathy and be a better founder and CEO. By keeping their fraud rates low, we also help build trust with customers. We help Ava with fraud detection and prevention throughout the customer’s lifecycle, from onboarding to account funding. Ava picked a level of control over their fraud risk that works for them. Every growth business is different. I often say to our customers that Sardine operates in three modes: 🤖 Full self driving: We do the work for you. E.g. we offer fraud indemnification on Card or ACH purchases or money loads. This is great for companies that want to outsource their fraud prevention as well as chargeback representment to us entirely. 💻 Automatic stick shift: We offer a fraud risk rating informed by hundreds of rules and machine learning. This is great for companies who still want control but don't have an army of data scientists to run their own models. 🚗 Manual stick shift: we offer all the 4,800+ features that our ML model uses as a feature store via BigQuery or Snowflake. The ML teams can then include our features for training and scoring in real time. Some of our enterprise clients love this. What Omar mentioned he likes most about Sardine is this level of flexibility. For where they are now, the automated stick shift approach makes the most sense, given that we simplified and hidden all the complicated machinery. I wanted this at Coinbase and Revolut, something that would meet me where I’m at. #fraud #growth #startups

Imagine you’re the CEO of a BaaS company processing around €700 million in transactions each month. Onboarding activity of one of your customers suddenly spiked. This isn’t the usual flow of new users joining the platform. Every account followed a precise pattern, each created with almost mechanical timing. No doubt, this is a fraud. How to manage it? What lessons to learn? This is Nick R.’s story: https://lnkd.in/e7hASDum

Compliance isn't just about ticking boxes anymore. It's about strategic use of technology for better decision-making and risk-mitigation. I'm proud of our team at Babel Street for challenging status quo and leading the charge for more efficient, effective, and accurate compliance. Check out this interview in Fintech Nexus to see why.